Uncategorized
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Issues of Genetic Fitness
Using historic photographs and documents, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center presents an eye-opening, troubling chronicle of the U.S. eugenics movement in the early 20th century. The archive’s aim is to stimulate people to think about possible similarities between eugenics, dedicated to improving human genetic stock through better breeding, and some current discussions […]
- Health & Medicine
Budding Tastes: Higher blood pressure in newborns links to salt preference
Babies who tolerate a salty flavor have higher blood pressure on average than their less tolerant counterparts do.
- Math
Testing for Divisibility
The crisp new dollar bill that I have just taken from my wallet bears the serial number 24598176. It’s easy to tell that the number is exactly divisible by 2 but not by 5. Is it divisible by 3? by 4? by 11? In a 1962 Scientific American article, Martin Gardner noted that during the […]
- Earth
Nature’s Own: Ocean yields gases that had seemed humanmade
Chemical analyses of seawater provide the first direct evidence that the ocean may be a significant source of certain atmospheric gases that scientists had previously assumed to be produced primarily by industrial activity.
- Astronomy
X-Ray Chaos: Violence shows itself in a nearby galaxy
New X-ray observations provide additional evidence that Centaurus A, the nearest radio-wave-emitting galaxy to Earth that has a supermassive black hole, is a maelstrom of violence.
- Earth
Killer Cocktails: Drug mixes threaten aquatic ecosystems
Trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs in waterways may work together to deform and kill native microscopic organisms.
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Not a Turn-On: Alleged X chromosome activator may be a dud
A gene that helps regulate X chromosome activity in mice doesn't work in people.
- Materials Science
Spinning Fine Threads: Silkworms coerced to make better silk
The caterpillars that spin commercial silk can make tougher or more elastic threads, depending on how fast they're forced to spin.
- Ecosystems
Tougher Weeds? Borrowed gene helps wild sunflower
Feeding concerns about developing superweeds, a test of sunflowers shows for the first time that a biologically engineered gene moving from a crop can give an advantage to wild relatives under naturalistic conditions.
- Health & Medicine
Toxin Trumped: New malaria vaccine protects mice
An experimental vaccine neutralizes a toxic molecule made by malaria-causing parasites.
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19103
Your article on microbial-efflux-pump research immediately caused me to relate the phenomenon to immune system response. Have the researchers considered the possibility of such a response triggering the formation of efflux pumps, either specific to the triggering “foreign” body or to a group of bodies similar to the cow pox-small pox link? Robert E. HubbardWinter […]
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Keeping Bugs from Pumping Drugs
Researchers hope that attacking the machinery some microbes use to pump antimicrobial agents out of their cells may help deal with the increasing problem of drug resistance.
